The original Dark Times was released almost eight months ago. In the interim, I spent several months working on a three-partcampaignseries as a fun experiment in implementing platforming and role-playing into a third-person shooter.

I also let some neat ideas for expanding on this mod brew, and over the past couple of months I've been working on lots of asset creation for the new things I'd like to add. Because of all the things I'd like to add, it's not entirely proper to say that the end-result mod will simply be a "Dark Times 2.0," because a lot of what I'm adding goes against one of my fundamental premises of the original mod (and that is to have a small mod because no maps were added). In that light, I've decided to call the continuation of Dark Times an "expansion:" Dark Times II: Rising Son.

"Rising Son" is set in the time period immediately following "Dark Times" - that is to say that it's set in the context of Star Wars (A New Hope) and the period immediately after. This is fun for me because I'll get to add some notable personages that only showed up starting in that movie, and I'll get to play around with some things that are more familiar to a lot of people - rather than the largely-expanded-universe of "The Force Unleashed," which was the inspiration for the original Dark Times.

Rising Son won't just be about new heroes and different-looking units, though. As mentioned above, this is taking a break from the original idea of "only working with stock maps to reduce filesize." While I'm not planning on making anything bloated, by any stretch of the imagination, I did decide that it would be fun to try out some concept maps I've wanted to do as well as some maps that simply have fun visual references. Because of that, you'll see several new maps added to your Battlefront with this incarnation of the mod.

I don't like saying much about anything I haven't actually implemented or tried yet, so I won't go into too much detail about some of the new modes of play I'm planning on adding - however, I do have at least one new mode in the conceptual stage as well as plans to implement a much larger, storyline-based mode. I can say for sure that the fun changes from the original Dark Times mod - wave mode, random heroes, units, skies - will all be expanded upon. Right now all the maps, in addition to selecting random elements from the original mod, will now select a random time period as well - meaning that you'll either have units and heroes representing the time period between Episodes III and IV (Dark Times) or the time period between Episodes IV and V (Rising Son).

In any case, I've already added several new elements, but I won't show them all at once so as not to overload anyone with data. Instead I will give a steady drip of news which is hopefully enjoyable for everyone - and if not that, at least it's enjoyable for me.

Because I wouldn't want to leave anyone with just a wall of text and no pictures, here is a short teaser:

That's because you're looking at a stock map. The teaser was just an announcement and it's not a real "new look" at anything, other than the Luke Skywalker hero model. (You can also see new particle effects and Yavin IV's alternate sky in that teaser, but those are minor changes I wouldn't expect anyone to notice in a Youtube video).

I have a lot of tangible new material to post, but for this particular news update I wanted to confine it simply to an announcement.

You can always see some of the changes from the earlier release in some of the prior news updates.